Editorial: Don’t trust Wynne on car insurance

In 2013, Premier Kathleen Wynne promised to cut auto insurance rates for Ontario’s 9.7 million drivers by an average of 15 per cent annually by August, 2015. Upon failing to achieve that promise — the government today claims rates are 6.6 per cent lower compared to 2013 — Wynne shrugged off her original commitment as a “stretch goal.” In other words, a commitment she knew would be hard to keep when she made it.

For this reason, all aspects of Wynne’s “Fair Auto Insurance Plan” announced Tuesday should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

This time, the Wynne government is making no specific commitment to lower rates, but claims its new plan will do so by improving the system.

It includes:

Creating standardized treatment plans for the most common types of injuries suffered by victims in car crashes.

Establishing independent centres to assess serious injuries in order to reduce costly legal fights between accident victims and insurance companies over the extent of their injuries.

Creating a Serious Fraud Office to combat insurance fraud.

Ensuring people are not charged excessive auto insurance premiums simply because of where they live.

The Wynne government is promising to have some of these measures underway by spring, but who’s to say that following the June 2018 election, they won’t be dismissed as “stretch goals” by Wynne if she’s re-­elected?

Finally, the Liberals have had 14 years in power to address the issue of Ontario’s broken auto insurance system.

They have failed to do so.

The same April 2017 study that produced the recommendations the Wynne government says it will implement, reported that as of 2015, the average auto insurance premium in Ontario of $1,458 annually was 24 per cent higher than in Alberta, double Quebec’s average and almost 55 per cent higher than the Canadian average of $930.

It said if Ontarians paid the average cost of car insurance in Canada, they would save about $528 per vehicle annually, almost 40 per cent of the $10 billion annually they pay for insurance.

With a record like that, why should anyone believe Wynne’s 11th-hour promise to fix the system now, just a few months before the June 2018 election?